There seems to be a lower size limit for conventional, compressor-based refrigeration. The result is that portable cooling devices are always simple fans, or at best, evaporative cooling units. What prevents conventional refrigeration and air conditioning from working at sizes much smaller than a dorm refrigerator?
In: Technology
For a fridge, it’s mostly because any smaller is not really useful. Part of the thing with a fridge is that it needs to be full of stuff to easily stay cold. Every time you open it, the cold air in it pours out and needs to be rechilled. If you have it mostly full of food/drinks, then that extra stuff in there helps to regulate the temperature. If you only have a single carton of milk in a fridge when you open it, it’s going to warm up a lot before the fridge is sufficiently chilled again.
As for an air conditioner, the main problem is that they don’t create cold from nowhere. They are just moving heat extremely well from inside your home to outside. This is why one side is always outside of your home. If you don’t move the hot air it produces out, then you’ve just got a device with a cold end and a hot end. Those are actually still made and sold — we call them dehumidifiers. You can actually get a small desk sized dehumidifier, although they tend to be larger so that they have enough capacity that they don’t need to be emptied for a day or two.
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